HortaChickenist
In the Brooder
Okay Chicken Peeps,
If your like me and try chickening from an organic or sustainable approach you have probably come along Diatomaceous Earth and its suggestions for use in and around the coop for controlling various insect populations.
I pride myself on running a clean coop and just posted a thread dealing with a recent mite infestation I had to deal with...I had been using DE along with other organic sprays to control insects during my routine maintenance when a bout of heavy rains and flooding brought in the buggers (mites) to unprecedented levels and it became a small scale infestation.
I clean my nesting boxes weekly and had to go into super vigilant mode to get this under control, so when I tapped out my box liner onto a white paper...I found a good amount of mites happily running through the DE...well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that obviously it's not working to well when the mites were playing hide and go seek in the stuff
soooo long story short...I called BS on the DE and followed up with 3 weekly applications of Permethrin (twice) and in the middle IC3...so far so good...lots of chicken eggs and no mite eggs or signs of mites. I am keeping an eye out and doing preventative spraying anyways.
Funny thing was a good number of people responded as well, saying the exact same thing BS on DE...so just wanted to clear the air (supposedly its bad for the birds to breathe anyways) once and for all.. whathca think?
If your like me and try chickening from an organic or sustainable approach you have probably come along Diatomaceous Earth and its suggestions for use in and around the coop for controlling various insect populations.
I pride myself on running a clean coop and just posted a thread dealing with a recent mite infestation I had to deal with...I had been using DE along with other organic sprays to control insects during my routine maintenance when a bout of heavy rains and flooding brought in the buggers (mites) to unprecedented levels and it became a small scale infestation.
I clean my nesting boxes weekly and had to go into super vigilant mode to get this under control, so when I tapped out my box liner onto a white paper...I found a good amount of mites happily running through the DE...well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that obviously it's not working to well when the mites were playing hide and go seek in the stuff

Funny thing was a good number of people responded as well, saying the exact same thing BS on DE...so just wanted to clear the air (supposedly its bad for the birds to breathe anyways) once and for all.. whathca think?